by Anna Filatova
03/29/2002 | 09:53 PM
According to the info we received from the leading Taiwanese mainboard manufacturers, the mass shipments of the new integrated chipset from Intel for Pentium 4 processors aka i845G should start next week. However, it doesn’t mean that the mainboards based on this chipset will start selling right away. The official launch of i845G is scheduled for May 20. Until that day the chipsets will be shipped to the manufacturers, so that they could start the mass production. No boards will be sold before that day.
i845G samples have been by many mainboard makers for a long time now, and most of them have already prepared their mainboard designs. For instance, we managed to get a bit more details on the ASUS’ mainboard aka P4B533-VM. Here it is:<%BANNER[article]%>
The mainboard is designed for Socket478 Pentium 4 CPUs with 400MHz/533MHz Quad Pumped Bus. it will have 2 DIMM slots for PC1600/PC2100 DDR SDRAM, an AGP 4x slot, 3 PCI slots, AC’97 sound, integrated LAN controller, USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 ports.
We should say that the mainboard manufacturers are very optimistic about their i845G based products. This new chipset will not only support Pentium 4 processors with 533MHz bus, but will also feature a new ICH 4 South Bridge with integrated USB 2.0 hub. Besides, i845G will also have a totally new integrated graphics core with tile architecture, which will prove faster than any other previous graphics cores. The major tidbit of this new integrated graphics from Intel will be its low demand on the bus bandwidth of the graphics memory, which will be partially borrowed from RAM. Even those NVIDIA guys who commented on the upcoming i845G graphics said that the company may lose about 25% of the value graphics cards market this way. The performance of the new integrated graphics core is expected to be about the same as that of GeForce2 MX chip. At the same time the boards on i845G are supposed to cost $140-$150. It is the combination of these features that should grant i845G its success.
Intel itself positions i845G as a solution for sub-$1300 PCs with Pentium 4 CPUs working at up to 2GHz core clock.